Labour Market Analysis Guide

The ESO Labour Market Analysis reports labour market statistics about a specific occupation linked to an educational program. The purpose of the report is to provide current labour market statistics and trends to each program to assist in decision-making. The ESO labour Market Analysis report will be updated annually and a future model is currently being developed to include scenario based modeling.

Labour Market Statistics

Program Statistics

Includes the number of applicants, program size, program graduates. For some programs there were no statistics reported and is reported as “no data available”. Most certificate and apprenticeship programs were not included in our study as our study focused mostly on full-time programs.

National Occupation Code used by Statistics Canada. Each educational program is linked to one or more occupations. In cases where there may be more than one occupation that matches a program, references were made to the Graduate Employment Outcome Survey to find the occupation with the highest number of graduates working.

Occupation Size

Represents the number of employed individuals. These individuals have worked in the past week prior to the Census and the value includes both part-time and full-time individuals.

Retirement Rate

See Forecast Model section under Occupation Employment Growth Rates.

Turnover Rate

See Forecast Model section under Occupation Voluntary Turnover Rate

Forecast Model

Industry Employment Growth Rates

Industry employment data was forecasted using the Holt-Winters method based on 10 years of quarterly data and based on 20 years of quarterly data. The 10-year based forecast was chosen, as the forecast was not significantly different and captured seasonality better than the 20-year based forecast.

Occupation Employment Growth Rates

Occupation growth rates were calculated as weighted average of the occupation ratio in each industry and the forecasted industry growth rate.

Jobs Due to Growth

Using the occupation employment growth rates we forecasted the occupation size for the next five years and calculated the number of expansion jobs as the difference between the current year occupation size and the previous year occupation size.

Occupation Voluntary Turnover Rate

The BC voluntary turnover rates by industry are not recorded by any agencies; instead our model uses the national voluntary turnover rates by industry as close substitutes. The occupation voluntary turnover rate was then calculated as a weighted average of the occupation ratio in each industry and the industry turnover rates.

We also assume that there is a natural churn in the labour market, where individuals who leave and create a vacancy are transitioning into another vacancy; making the net change in vacancies zero. This activity is not recorded by any agencies and in our model is estimated to cause only 10% of the vacancies created by the voluntary rate to be unfilled vacancies.

Occupation Retirement Rate

The retirement rate assumes that those employed between the ages of 55 to 75 are retiring in the next five years. The retirement rate over five years was calculated by taking the percentage of those employed between the ages of 55 to 75. The exception is for managerial positions where the retirement rate over five years was calculated by taking the percentage of those employed between the ages of 65 to 75. To annualize the retirement rate, we multiplied the retirement rate by the estimated retirement ratio for that given year.

Jobs due to Attrition

The number of jobs due to replacement and retirement was calculated as:

Jobs Vacancies

The job vacancies represent the number of unfilled vacancies due to employment growth and attrition.